knechtwent back to work, Paulina found herself alone in his apartment, without a job, friends, or more than a few words of German. "The people were never bad to me," she says. "Theywere, in a way, kind. They just weren't interested. 'You can come if you want, but no one needs you here.' " By the following winter, she was flying home to South America, three months pregnant. Herrenknecht spent the next year and a half trying to get her back. He sent let- ters at first, then money when his daugh- ter was born. He twice flew out to visit her, and to ask her to marry him. Finally, in the summer of 1982, she agreed. She has since made her peace with Allmanns- weier, she says: "This is probably the best land in the world. The people are very intelligent, very laborious." Her German has become fluent, and she has had two more children with Herrenknecht, all now grown: her elder daughter is an in- dustrial designer, her second daughter is a stewardess, and her son is studying me- chanical engineering. If anything, it's her husband who sometimes seems ambiva- lent about his home town. "Martin needs some fixed points in his life, and Allmannsweier is definitely the most important one," Kühn told me. Yet some locals complain that Herrenknecht has "lifted off" -he drives a silver Porsche Carrera around town-and he is often ir- ritated by the town's stodginess. "There is one person on the Ortschaftsrat" -the vil- lage council-"I think he wowd kill him ifhe cowd," one local told me. Two years ago, Herrenknecht offered to build a fu- neral pavilion for the town cemetery, at his own expense. The council members accepted the offer, but only if they cowd tinker with the design. Herrenknecht told them to take it or leave it. "So we still don't have a funeral house, and people get wet in the rain," Renate Malter, the town's Protestant minister, told me. On another occasion, the council insisted that Herrenknecht cover the roof of a new factory with grass, to replace the green space that had been lost to it. Herren- knecht, in turn, threatened to put a herd of plastic cows on the building. "There is a little warfare between them," Malter told me, when I visited her at the parsonage. "The council has to show that it has a little power. Then Herrenknecht gets angry when they won't give him what he wants." He is not 72 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 15, 2008 a very diplomatic person, she acknowl- edged, but he can be very generous. Her husband, Axel, smiled and added, "Der liebe Gott hat dem Herrenknecht einen Dickkopf gegeben." ("The Good Lord gave Herrenknecht a fat head" -a stub- born streak.) "But this fat head, this strong will, he needs. Without it he cowd not do what he does." T hese days, Herrenknecht seems most at home among the Spanish. While the Swiss sweat over every cen- time, and the Germans recently can- celled their plans for a high-speed mag- netic levitation train in Munich, the Spanish have embraced mass transit with a kind of crazed exuberance. Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid, and Valencia are all ex- panding their metro lines, and new sys- tems are being laid in Granada, Gijón, and Má1aga. Spanish trains were once among the slowest in Western Europe- the Madrid-to-Barcelona line felt as if it were being hawed by mwes. Now doz- ens of new rail tunnels are being driven through the mountains, connecting the major cities in a wheel-and-spoke pat- tern, radiating out from Madrid. If all goes as planned, the system will comprise more than six thousand miles of track by 2020, making it the largest high-speed rail project in Europe. "I see for Spain a great future," Her- renknecht told me. We had landed in Barcelona and were being driven to a site northwest of the city, to see its newest subway tunnel. "Before, you always thought they are a holiday people," he said. "They have siesta. Now they are the hardest-working popwation in Eu- rope-the absolute top. Spain is the new Switzerland." Barcelona has more than a million and a haIfinhabitants, yet it's hemmed in by mountains on one side and the Med- iterranean on the other. Rush-hour traffic often comes to a standstill downtown- " I ' 1 L h " H t s liKe a strap on your eart, erren- knecht said-so the city is investing in public transportation. The new subway line will run for twenty-eight miles, dip- ping and rising between stations, con- necting the suburban north to the indus- trial south and to the airport. The soil along the way is a loose mixture of clay and sand, and lies almost entirely under the water table-it's never more than two miles from the sea. "If you dig a hole, it closes up again behind you," Georg Sie- bert, one of Herrenknecht's chief engi- neers, explained, when we arrived at the site. "It's just like a hole in the seashore." To keep the tunnel from collapsing, the miners were using one of Herren- knecht's Earth Pressure Balance ma- chines. This had a sealed cutting head that injected the soil with a thick foam- its sharp ammonia scent filled the air. The foam stabilized the soil long enough for it to be excavated, then the miners lined the exposed walls with watertight concrete rings. The rings were carted down the tunnel in curved segments, on an automated trolley. Each segment was six feet wide and one foot thick, and weighed around fifteen thousand pounds. When it was ready to be installed, a ro- botic arm lifted it up with a vacuum plate and swung it into place along the wall. The segments fit together almost seam- lessly: six segments to the circle, and a keystone on top. Like BruneI's ship- worm, the machine was a self-contained factory, leaving a ready-made tunnel be- hind it. Compared with Switzerland, every- thing here seemed to be moving at dou- ble time. The miners were paid bonuses for speed and for working on Sunday. They had no patience for interrup- tions-they glanced at our party with barely concealed annoyance-and no need for perfection. The trolley tracks at Erstfeld were perfectly straight; here they meandered a litde, like strands of pasta, so the trolley wobbled as it ran. "The Spanish want speed," Herren- knecht said, grinning. "It is an excellent character, but they want speed." At some sites, he said, the Spanish hired two companies to dig each barrel of a tunnel, so the project would turn into a race. This tunnel had only one shaft, wide enough for two trains, but the miners were still working at a record pace. They'd installed twenty-two rings in the past twelve hours alone-a distance of a hundred and thirty-two feet. Subways, once an astonishment of urban life, are becoming commonplace. Herrenknecht has more than a hundred machines tunnelling under cities world-